Welcome to the Story Circle. Introduction. These stories come from the living oral traditions of West Africa. They were written down in three early collections from the Gold Coast, now Ghana; Southern Nigeria; and Sierra Leone. In their pages, Spider and Tortoise are clever, boastful, generous, greedy, and very human. Animals bargain with kings. The moon and stars acquire their places in the sky. Ordinary people meet magic on the road, at the farm, and beside the water.

This edition is designed for listeners from the early teenage years through adulthood. It favors humor, wonder, animal tales, riddles, and adventures. A number of the darkest selections in the source books have been omitted. The remaining stories still contain the sudden reversals, punishments, dangers, and old social assumptions common to traditional folklore.

The English reflects the editions in which the tales first appeared. The Sierra Leone stories preserve a historical Krio-influenced storytelling dialect. A listener may need a few minutes to settle into its patterns. Beef often means animal; pickin means child; small-small means little by little; and cunning describes cleverness. The voice used in this production is a synthetic American English voice, so it does not attempt to reproduce an African accent or claim cultural authenticity.

The collectors and editors worked in a colonial…